Haunted Child

Synopsis

A small boy is driving his mother to distraction - waking at night, hearing phantom noises and fixating on his absent father. When he glimpses a figure prowling the house at night, a shadow is cast which gradually strips away his childhood certainties. This chilling and unsettling play asks demanding questions about the things we believe and their consequences.

Our Review:

9 December 2011

Metaphorical resonance threatens to drown out narrative in Joe Penhall’s three-hander. Ostensibly a family play with a young son caught up in his parents’ battles, Haunted Child makes no secret of its real purpose. It shows the colossal tussle between a broken society and a new world order.

Penhall is open to accusations of over-directness and many will prefer their bitter pills better disguised, but there’s no denying the play’s forceful urgency.

It starts with a child’s midnight existential crisis. Convinced he’s heard a ghost – possibly his father’s – in the loft, Thomas darts downstairs to his mother Julie (Sophie Okonedo). “If we’re just going to die anyway - what’s the point?” He is answered with a hug.

In fact, Dad is not dead, but disappeared. Douglas (Ben Daniels) soon turns up, bedraggled and shivering, having converted to some cultish p...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 13 January 2012:

Watching Haunted Child was a deeply frustrating experience and not just because of the disruptive behaviour of two school parties (and the dismissive attitude of one of the teacher / "supervisors"). Joe Penhall's play concerns a husband and father in the midst of a major mid-life crisis who returns to the marital home after an absence of several weeks believing he has found answers and spiritual enlightenment from a cult whose true motives become more sinister as the play unfolds. If Penhall had chosen to carefully build on Douglas' intially rational justifications of the group which gradually reveal themselves to require total submission and a large financial tithe this would have been a very good play indeed. Unfortunately he reduces the impact by introducing elements of unnecessary humour such as drinking a bucket of salt water (beat that Rooster Byron) and absurd Tai Chi poses. Despite this Ben Daniels is excellent as the wired and clearly unstable Douglas. Sophie Okonedo has a face that naturally radiates misery but she doesn't capture the full outrage that Julie should feel except when she demands to know if Douglas would blow himself up on a tube train if the group demanded it - one of the few moments when the true evil of cults and fundamentalist religions are truly laid bare. Jeremy Herrin, who made a pig's ear of Death and the Maiden, directs and perhaps if he had been able to impose a more suitable tone throughout the play this could have been as good as the premise suggests it should have been....

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